NormanBates:
My basic photography tutorial has a section on video, talking about settings, equipment, etc, that you may need or want if you're going to shoot video with a DSLR:http://www.similaar.com/foto/tuten/600.html

And the "stuff for video" section of my equipment recommendations may be useful too:http://www.similaar.com/foto/equipment/us_video.html

HenrikBC:
Ah - the world of video and many an opinion (not unlike photography I believe). :)

Regardless of what you want to do with the video - just start shooting something. As soon as you have something in the can and review it, it will be easier each time to see what you want to do different - or what gear you suddenly realize you just MUST have in order to net better results.

Best of luck. :)

TC1006:
Thank You all for the great suggestions...

What are your thoughts on the CineStyle from Technicolor?

I was also considering purchasing a Rode VideoMic Pro for the offcamera sound...thoughts??

remsy_atassi:
Cinestyle is way overrated IMO. It is a flat picture style designed to be graded, but the codec of Canon cameras is not good enough to stand up to this kind of color correction. As soon as you even drop in a basic LUT the shadows have picked up an insane amount of noise.

As far as 3rd party picture profiles, I much prefer Marvel's. Typically I just use Neutral though - with sharpness dialed all the way down, contrast down 3 notches, and saturation down two notches. If I'm not planning to grade then I usually with dial in an extra notch or two of contrast and saturation.

Regarding the Rhode video mic I would again shy away from it. They are nice mics but your main issue with the 5D3 will actually be the preamp, and you are better spending some money on an external recorder first. Then you can worry about getting a nice mic - most recorders have an internal mic to start.

Policar:

--- Quote from: remsy_atassi on July 12, 2012, 09:59:20 AM ---Cinestyle is way overrated IMO. It is a flat picture style designed to be graded, but the codec of Canon cameras is not good enough to stand up to this kind of color correction. As soon as you even drop in a basic LUT the shadows have picked up an insane amount of noise.

--- End quote ---

Read my post above. Cinestyle is ONLY for shooting b roll or crash cam footage on shoots where the other footage is in log mode. For anything else it's useless. It doesn't have more lattitude, it just places brightness values differently. There are a few cameras that shoot log (Alexa, C300, F3, film scans) and if those are your A cameras and they are shooting in log then cinestyle will give you (trivially) more flexibility and integrate significantly better into your workflow. I've used my dSLRs a few times as b cameras for 35mm, Red, and Alexa shoots...to be honest it doesn't matter that much but having log footage to intercut with log footage provides flexibility and a common starting point. In each of those cases we also had some footage shot in neutral mode and it was just a matter of grading it differently.

Otherwise, it is worse in every way than neutral. Worse tonality, saturation, and skin tones. More difficult to composite. For sound (excepting videography in which case that would be appropriate) I would buy a shotgun mic and an external recorder.